Shopify adds official support for subscriptions, upsells in checkout via partner apps

Shopify has taken a big step forward in enhancing its checkout experience with two new features.

The first is the ability for merchants to sell subscriptions, an increasing popular business model.

It’s important to note that Shopify did not develop this feature on its own — it worked with some of the biggest names in the subscription market, including ReCharge and Bold, to create tighter integrations.

Merchants still have to subscribe to a compatible Shopify subscription app to make this feature works.

Shopify is touting the new approach allows for a better user experience since the necessary GUI is updated natively.

The company has also been cracking down on apps that affect the checkout — but appears to be partnering with leaders in the field to improve this part of the experience.

Subscription revenue is expected to boom to $478 billion by 2025 compared to $15 billion in 2019.

For upsells, which are special offers made during or after checkout that let customers add items to their chart at the last minute, Shopify took a similar approach — it’s partnership with Ultimate Special Offers, Zipify, Store Recon and The Vaan Group, among others to insert these features into the checkout process seamlessly.

Shopify has closely maintained control over how the checkout pages look and feel — and it’s a common complaint that more add on fucntionality can’t be added and that features, such as a single page checkout, aren’t available for free or via customizations.

However, Shopify has always maintained that it processes millions of checkouts a day and has done extensive experimenting with its checkout process. Today, that total is around 2.5 billion checkouts.

Some common workarounds are to include JavaScript ScriptTags that render elements such as trustmarks, countdowns and upsells to checkout pages, but these arne’t officially developed by Shopify and could come under increasingly scrutiny in the future.

While customers still won’t be able to customize the checkout fully, these new apps likely will enhance user experience significant.